Yeah but the indie singing we're talking about is a limited voice NOT stretched to its limits through the application of ingenuity and craft. I don't think the typical indie singing style sounds anything like Billie Holiday.
I suspect Orbit is right about the importance of heroin.
― Rockist Scientist (rockistscientist), Monday, 19 April 2004 10:24 (twenty years ago) link
― Rockist Scientist (rockistscientist), Monday, 19 April 2004 10:29 (twenty years ago) link
― hinter_land (hinter_land), Monday, 19 April 2004 10:34 (twenty years ago) link
Amen.
― Matthew Perpetua (Matthew Perpetua), Monday, 19 April 2004 12:24 (twenty years ago) link
"clipped diction" = good name for pop punk band
― amateur!st (amateurist), Monday, 19 April 2004 17:38 (twenty years ago) link
― duke spin, Monday, 19 April 2004 17:45 (twenty years ago) link
they couldn't sing; or they were too blissed out to have intonation (the pudding theory) and that is what became "cool", emulated, repeated, associated with hip--and now we have the result: flat indie voice[tm]
― Orbit (Orbit), Monday, 19 April 2004 22:14 (twenty years ago) link
― morris pavilion (samjeff), Monday, 19 April 2004 22:17 (twenty years ago) link
― Collardio Gelatinous (collardio), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 01:05 (twenty years ago) link
― sexyDancer, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 05:58 (twenty years ago) link
― duke garage, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 06:09 (twenty years ago) link
― seyxDancer, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 06:12 (twenty years ago) link
― duke hello, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 06:17 (twenty years ago) link
― sexyDancer, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 06:20 (twenty years ago) link
― duke dragoon, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 06:21 (twenty years ago) link
― sexyDancer, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 06:24 (twenty years ago) link
― duke record, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 06:26 (twenty years ago) link
― sexyDancer, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 06:44 (twenty years ago) link
― duke pinfold, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 06:46 (twenty years ago) link
― amateur!st (amateurist), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 07:44 (twenty years ago) link
― spittle (spittle), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 14:37 (twenty years ago) link
― amateur!st (amateurist), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 14:45 (twenty years ago) link
― spittle (spittle), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 15:35 (twenty years ago) link
― duke come on, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 16:34 (twenty years ago) link
― sexyDancer, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 17:53 (twenty years ago) link
― queenbee, Thursday, 29 April 2004 18:25 (twenty years ago) link
― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Monday, 14 June 2004 00:09 (twenty years ago) link
― Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Monday, 14 June 2004 00:37 (twenty years ago) link
I hear the same quality in the Left Banke--"She May Call You Up Tonight." A bit too in Colin Blunstone. And Alex Chilton, too.
― eddie hurt (ddduncan), Monday, 14 June 2004 02:16 (twenty years ago) link
also, some classic country recordings could be easily mentioned as precursors - "ragged but right", tons of stuff on the anthology box.
but i don't think you can get anywhere with this because essentially they're all pretty different at what they do. if you stop overthinking and just compare julian stroke with stuart murdoch and with laetitia sadier, three huge velvets fans, any common ground is tenuous.
if you listen to a new wave hits of the 80s cd, what you notice is that the singers aren't lacking in dynamic attack or even pipes, what unites them is just weirdness. some singers have really weird voices, or they yelp in an overexcited way, or they drawl, etc. it's analogous to when bop took over big band jazz - quite apart from the strange songs and solos, people talked about bird's harsh tone, dizzy's squeaks, to say nothing of monk or [late 40s] miles.
so if new wave hits have weird singers [of course disco and garage rock had plenty of odd singing voices too, but i think new wave was more about dressing and sounding different], deeper into indie and true punk [people who don't chart] you have further diversity. some of them do indeed sing off key quite a bit - both mark e smith and his erstwhile copycat steve malkmus have claimed they are a bit tone deaf, but the rest of their bands were often out of tune as well, so this must be a bit of a pose and they are going offkey on purpose - when people first hear stuart murdoch, his occasional wanderings offkey leap out and smack them. such a pretty song, why can't the singer sing?
you can't say it comes from lou reed or chet baker or any one guy; it's not as if feedback guitar noise wouldn't exist if not for jimi hendrix. there's always been people in folk music who drawl their songs. and it's not as if all singers in indie rock sound do what you're talking about. the key is: nonconformity. they are all trying to sound a little bit unique. as opposed to a metal band or a pop group, whose songwriting guitarists or keyboard players look for singers who will sound right, correct, normal.
― mig (mig), Monday, 14 June 2004 02:34 (twenty years ago) link
he also had the proto-"devo yelp" as I like to call it.
― latebloomer (latebloomer), Monday, 14 June 2004 02:37 (twenty years ago) link
"With a little historical distance, it's clear that what Chet Baker did with Chet Baker Sings is not unlike what the Ramones did with their first album: simply turned every contemporary expectation on its head. ... He sang those great sentimental lyrics by Larry Hart, Johnny Mercer, and Ira Gershwin (previously considered suitable only for female vocalists), but he sang them at one remove, cool and plain, acknowledging the sentiment without buying into it -- glancing at it over his shoulder, as through the window of a door closed behind him -- so that what we get is not the feeling but the memory of it. In contemporary terms, Baker does not so much "perform" these songs as "simulate" them...
...There is no vibrato, no "beautiful" singing, and no "strong" statement. There are no extended solos, no range dynamics, no volume dynamics, no tempo dynamics, no expressive timbre shifts, no suppression of extant melodies, no harmonic meandering, no virtuoso high-speed scales, and, in fact, very few sixteenth-notes -- none of the stuff, in short, that told jazz critics of the time what the player was doing and how "good" he was at it. All you got was the song -- dispassionately articulated with lots of spaces..."
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Saturday, 11 March 2006 10:09 (eighteen years ago) link
― xhuxk, Saturday, 11 March 2006 16:18 (eighteen years ago) link
― xhuxk, Saturday, 11 March 2006 16:19 (eighteen years ago) link
Skeeter Davis?
― xhuxk, Saturday, 11 March 2006 16:24 (eighteen years ago) link
I'll grant that this comes down to how much a given indie band/singer draws from the irksome, tedious, limply-sung Velvet Underground lineage, but I do think it's weird to paint all indie singing ("the indie voice") with that brush.
― Doctor Casino (Doctor Casino), Saturday, 11 March 2006 17:49 (eighteen years ago) link
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Saturday, 11 March 2006 18:31 (eighteen years ago) link
― xtina rulez, Saturday, 11 March 2006 19:58 (eighteen years ago) link
And then, as that becomes more of a usual style, you get little things coming out of it. There's the singer who can't pull off the fancy stuff but tries anyway, and we enjoy hearing the everyday-person really strain and work to emote. Or you have the slackery thing people are associating with Malkmus here, where the singer half-tries to do something fancy, mostly misses it, and there's some vague irony in the "oh, whatever" brush-off it gets. Malkmus actually runs the gamut on this -- on songs like "Here" you get the plain-voice "honesty," on a lot of Wowee Zowee you get the straining-to-emote thing, and obviously a lot of elsewhere you get the slacking.
Plenty of other things in here, too. The Reed/Dylan thing comes out in a cool-guy drawl, which might be the "rootsy" American equivalent to the French arched-eyebrow cool. And that cedes over into rock yowling. Also don't forget Neil Young. Also don't forget kind of jokey indie voices.
In terms of plain-voice stuff, there's one version of it that really interests me: UK post-punk women and the high choirgirl voice! A lot of them did odd things with it (Ari Up or Lora Logic's flutters), but there was a big long streak of singing flat and sweet like kids in school. (See Girls at Our Best, maybe?)
But the root of most of these seems to be "I am not a fancy singer" -- whether it's slackery or sincere, the idea seems to be to sing in the ways you would when you were alone and not really "performing" to other people. The version of this I like is maybe the one that runs from Joao Gilberto (less "cool" than Astrud) to Stuart Murdoch, this microphone-enabled voice that's almost like humming, simple and unornamented.
― nabiscothingy, Saturday, 11 March 2006 20:14 (eighteen years ago) link
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Sunday, 12 March 2006 06:46 (eighteen years ago) link
― timmy tannin (pompous), Sunday, 12 March 2006 07:01 (eighteen years ago) link
― PRIVATE HELL 36 (Jody Beth Rosen), Sunday, 12 March 2006 08:25 (eighteen years ago) link
― PRIVATE HELL 36 (Jody Beth Rosen), Sunday, 12 March 2006 08:26 (eighteen years ago) link
― PRIVATE HELL 36 (Jody Beth Rosen), Sunday, 12 March 2006 08:28 (eighteen years ago) link
― claude allen (cracktivity1), Sunday, 12 March 2006 09:09 (eighteen years ago) link
― Myke. (Myke Weiskopf), Sunday, 12 March 2006 16:23 (eighteen years ago) link
pomo fiction for sure. i don't know poetry. who are some poets in that camp?
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Sunday, 12 March 2006 16:55 (eighteen years ago) link
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Sunday, 12 March 2006 17:08 (eighteen years ago) link
I certainly wasn't arguing for affectation - that conversation seems to be an offshoot of the original question - but rather for their arguable influence on a certain subsect of the indie population in the "anyone can sing" stakes.
― Myke. (Myke Weiskopf), Sunday, 12 March 2006 17:36 (eighteen years ago) link